Work samples

  • The Family Remains
    The Family Remains

    Acrylic, marker, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 31.5”x35”, 2024

    The Family Remains is a new series (and singular painting) featuring my family’s cooking pot lids as stand-ins for legacy and cultural transmission from 'the old country'.  I learned to cook in my maternal grandmother’s sauce pot; then my mother’s sauce and soup pots; later, my father’s soup and stew pots  As a helper, particularly with my grandmother, I learned so much more than cooking.

    The Backstory: I grew up in a sprawling Italian immigrant family in New York.  Though the language, food, idiosyncrasies and traditions were ever present, the pressure to be American, especially from my grandparents’ generation, was palpable.  Relatives continued to come from Italy through Ellis Island during my childhood. Italian was spoken by the adults but not permitted by us children. American first, Italian second. With the last of my parents’ generation passing, I consider what remains.  These paintings explore the rich stories, lessons and sometimes confusing messages that were my experience.

    In this painting, my grandmother's sauce pot lid is the anchor. What happens as family members age and pass.? What remains? The pod-filled head is me, traced by my husband years before he died in 2020.  The hands are tracings my son and I made, my hands, when he was little. Our pasts are all woven together to include forever and now.

    Available for Purchase

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About Gina

2024 OTW Artist   Baltimore City  

In everything she undertakes, mixed-media artist Gina Pierleoni brings individual elements together to create a more cohesive and loving whole.  Most of the series she creates are ongoing and have been in process for decades.

Her portraits on wooden panels (more than 300 to date) feature real people.  When installed, they are gathered together as a community or congregation. Old paintings are reworked into larger configurations… more

View Gina's Resume
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Mixed Media Portraits

I use portraiture to spark conversations about empathy and our common humanity.  The opposite of assumption, these images attempt to push past label and judgments; they seek to "de-separate" us.  My portrait installations feature real people, brought together as a community or congregation.

The portraits are created over weeks, months and years, each lovingly realized.  I start with a model, paying close attention to impressions and our conversations.  Both form the heart of the piece.  My goal is to honor each person.

After our time together, I continue alone recalling as much as possible about the sitter and our time together.  The remainder of what happens is intuited.  I draw, paint, scratch into, collage. Hand-made stencils and stamps create additional layers. Gender, race and age sometimes blur.  Figures emerge from long histories of surfaces and ghosted images.  These are real people, alive, changing, vulnerable and genuine.

  • Bevin and Grace
    Bevin and Grace
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    • Mixed Media Portraits and Installations

    My mixed media paintings are created over weeks, months and years, each lovingly realized.  I start with a model, paying close attention to impressions and our conversations.  Both form the heart of the piece.  After our time together, I continue alone recalling as much as possible about the sitter and our time together.  The remainder of what happens is intuited.  I draw, paint, scratch into, collage. Hand-made stencils and stamps create additional layers. Gender, race and age sometimes blur.  Figures emerge from long histories of surfaces and ghosted images.  These are real people, alive, changing, vulnerable and genuine.

     

    • Painted Stories
      Painted Stories
      Painted Stories is 60 mixed media portraits built as a large structure. Most portraits feature real people and each portrait has a story written on the back of the panel. Here's an example of one of the stories: "Another Saturday painting Jenn in her butterfly dress, sitting so calmly, no boys, no noise. I added 'hydrogen', the first element, to Jenn's portrait. Her home life was, from the telling of it, like a time bomb... highly flammable like hydrogen. Somehow, she balanced those realities... the calm, the ticking bomb and the butterfly.
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    • Birds

    I've always loved birds. No matter what happens in the world, I continue to find solace in their presence.  I watch for them, listen to their conversations and trust that nests will continue to be made, baby birds will be born, and one day leave those nests.  Birds continue to find a place in my paintings.
     

     

    • Percolation Pose
      Percolation Pose

      Percolation Pose

      (from the Human Icon series)

      The less I understand about where people go after their bodies die, the more credence I give to the birds as intermediaries between worlds, as though they don't recognize a dividing line.  Birds will continue to find a place in my paintings.

      Acrylic, graphite, colored pencil, hand-cut stamps and stencils on paper, 52”x 42”, 2023

      Available for Purchase
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    • Tearing Prayers, Arrows, and Video Interviews

    My grandmother, mother and aunts recited daily rosaries into their 80’s and 90’s.  Their hands worked a well-worn path from the crucifix to the first few beads, around the loop and back. They prayed, paced and rocked.  They prayed while vacuuming, making sauce, changing diapers. Prayers, were in their DNA. 
     
    I started tearing arrows from  old paintings and to-do lists during the 2015 uprisings in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.  In heartbreak, I was reminded of the women with their rosaries and my own childhood laps around the beads.  For me, tearing arrows has become a form of prayer.  I continue to make them.  There will always be people and places needing love.

    The arrow paintings and installations represent emphasis, attention, inner wisdom, a choice and the power of individuals and groups to create change together. 

    Three video interviews are part of the“Motivation on Monday” series by Myles Banks of Just Stunt Productions. 

     

    Read more about this project

    • Distilled (1/2or smaller)
      Distilled (1/2"or smaller)

      Distilled, begun several years ago, is an ongoing group of tiny (1/2"or smaller) hand-torn arrows.  Like the larger arrows, they are prayers for people and places.  These arrows are harder to tear because of their size so I spend more time with them.  Small can be powerful.

      acrylic, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper

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    • What Makes Us (Us) portrait installation

    Gina Pierleoni: What Makes Us (Us)
    at Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD
     
    Exhibition Statement
    Everyone deserves to be seen and heard.
     
    Over the past 26 years, I created nearly 300 portraits of people across the spectrum of familiarity. These images push past labels and judgements as they question perception, habit, and bias in how we place ourselves in relation to others. What Makes Us (Us) is the first time nearly the entire series has been displayed in one place.  

    In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I frequently sketched commuters and the homeless population inside Grand Central Station in New York.  Sometimes I would have a conversation that resulted in the person asking to have their portrait drawn. The volunteers were almost exclusively homeless. I offered the drawing as a thank you for our time together. The more I showed up, the more people would ask me to draw them. The deeper the connection, the closer the image resembled the sitter.

    During the same years, I bartended at a train station lounge. Some of the regulars were Vietnam veterans, who shared their struggles to reintegrate. Their compassion for one another regardless of rank was touching. Drawing portraits of them created conversations. I noticed parallel shame and invisibility among the homeless and veterans.

    Sketching became a form of advocacy. I didn’t imagine these drawings would one day provide a gateway to my own healing, form the central philosophy for my teaching and community building, and build a platform for the art I cared about making.

    When the series began, I made several drawings of my voice.  The first portraits, emotionally raw unearthings, used mostly charcoal lines. The process was physical, empowering.  Each year I added more portraits.  The pieces were reworked over months, years until the images came alive. Using a similar scale created an absence of hierarchy.

    I use portraiture to spark conversations about empathy and our common humanity.  Portrait painting demands curiosity, stillness and deep observation. My portraits are multi-layered: drawn, painted, scratched into, stamped and stenciled under, over and through the surfaces. I am painting from the inside out to convey the emotional fabric of someone, in addition to how they look. These are real people, alive, changing, genuine and vulnerable.”
     

     
     

     

    Read more about this project

    • What Makes Us (Us)
      What Makes Us (Us)
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    • Sewn Figures

    The sewn figures parallel my painting and mixed media processes.  Stitching is drawing, fabric is paint, and attached objects create layers. Through collecting, sorting  and valuing, materials headed for the landfill are sewn together to make something whole again.

    Each figure is made entirely from discarded and re-purposed materials (except for thread and paint). Materials have included: electric toothbrush rings, gift bag handles, any small things with holes in them, shoelaces, broken costume jewelry, hospital socks, old beads and buttons, rosaries and medals of saints, graduation tassels, sequins, leather scraps, fabric and yarn. Everything is sewn together with a simple looping stitch.

    • Taproot
      Taproot

      Hand-sewn figure made from 100% recycled and repurposed materials excluding thread.

      25"x10"x6"

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    • Painting Rag Shirts

    Painting Rag Shirts

    I’m making parallel sets of paintings: one intentional, the other created from what’s left behind.  My painting rags have accumulated for over 40 years, a byproduct of wiping paint, blending it, and cleaning hand-cut stencil and stamps. My palette has changed many times over the years.  Without any conscious effort, these cut up T-shirts rags become paintings.

    The pieces are sorted into short and long sleeves, bottom edges, necklines and middle sections.  A simple, visible hand-sewn looping stitch brings all the pieces together, unearthing their another T-shirt and implying the figure inside.  

    Some pieces like My Father’s Last Shirt are memorials.  Fur Shirt is a collection of hundreds of small rag trimmings that together created unexpected billowing results. 

    There are so many things we give up on because we can’t envision the potential and inherent beauty in them: things, places, each other. For me, these former rags create an opportunity for embracing history, possibility and transformation.

    Read more about this project

    • The Music
      The Music

      Someone gave me an old, tattered Pink Floyd T-shirt I knew I'd never wear.  Though the band and Dark Side of the Moon were part of my coming of age, it became a studio rag instantly.  When searching for just the right scraps for a new shirt, I came across Pink Floyd again.  I had to put a little piece on the image front and back, to create a place for the music.

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    • Remnants

    Remnants is a visual diary of my studio practice and a living, endless loop of using, re-envisioning, transforming and reusing.

    My art making process literally and philosophically involves putting pieces back together to create a more cohesive and loving whole. I envision it as a circle.  My mixed media paintings are made intentionally. With every project, there are leftovers.  Remnants is created from evidence of the creative process or, what’s left behind.  The bi-product of each way of working becomes part of this cycle.

    Remnants is an ongoing series.  It is a cataloguing system I’ve been using for decades. (I love the Periodic Table and library cataloguing systems.) Remnants began because the little bits of dried paint, colored pencil shavings, painting rag scraps, thread ends, pencil nubs, and brush handles gathered together were too beautiful to throw away.  As the tendrils of this series aged, I realized how important is to be aware of, not only my footprint in art making, but what I was de-valuing.  This series represents what’s left behind and it has created itself.

    As one example, I have a long history of painting over old paintings (some dating back to the late-1970’s and early 80’s), leaving traces of images seen and partly obscured.  In tearing up some of the older paintings into tiles  that are then attached to recent paintings, I am making old new again and compressing my art making timelines.

     

    Read more about this project

    • Thread
      Thread

      These bits of thread are saved from making my hand-sewn figures. After being collected in a jar, the thread can be removed to resemble magical birds nests.

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    • Forgetting Memory

     

    My mother, a healthy and active 86 year-old, developed an infection which traveled to her brain. Overninght, she was completely transformed, bed ridden and frail. Initially, she was only able to say a handful of phrases which, strung together, seemed meaningless: “You know”, "Wow”, and “I was thinking “.  Every once in a while she had moments of startling clarity.

    In the next few months, she rebounded and  learned to walk with a walker. Her ability to speak returned but her memory was dramatically impacted. She asked questions like, “Was I a good mother?” and “Was I a good wife?”   She didn't remember all of her 9 children unless she named them from oldest to youngest. My parents had been married for over 50 years but she'd misplaced her memories of  him.  It was as if the files in her brain had been randomly ransacked and areas were deleted or mismatched.  

    In many ways, she was more content because she didn't remember what troubled her in the past. My mother became funnier, even to herself, asking questions like, “What do you call the thing with two holes?”  I replied, “Pants?” She called her walker a wagon and most of the time was OK with her mix-ups. It was game we played of remembering and sometimes I got the answers right.

    These drawings reflect the space between my mother's mind before and after, memory and forgetting, the frustration of losing something you can’t find again, and the playful moments that sometimes happen when loss is treated like an adventure.
     

    Read more about this project

    • Chatter
      Chatter
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    • Statues for My Father

    After my father died, my mother handed me a stack of his funeral cards and said, "Why don't you make something from these?"  The cards honor his name (Gino Pierleoni, so close to mine), birth/death dates and the images and religious practice that was important to him.  I wondered whether there would be a point during the alteration process when these religious figures might no longer be considered sacred. As the images transformed from Jesus, Mary and the Saints to become regular people, the images remained sacred.

    The final pieces are mounted on wood, freestanding like statues.

    • Daughter of the Lions
      Daughter of the Lions
      mixed media, torn paintings and to-do lists on paper mounted on wood approximately 9"x2.5"x1"
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